No Present This Year

Christmas time is today (in Indonesian time), and i still don't see any big progress within the -Current changelog since December 14. I guess there are no big present from Pat and from the Slackware team.

My predictions is that they are busy with other things that might surprise others, but it's not ready for the prime time yet, so he kept it within their private testing area.

Let's just hope that there should be a good present in the new year since last Slackware was released last May, so it's nearly 8 months since then. In normal cycle, Slackware-Current starts roughly 3 months after the Stable version released, but up to last update, there hasn't been a big progress, except for security updates and critical bug fixes only.

I believe there will be some changes in the next Slackware release, due to some problems encountered within the open source community, such as Oracle's JRE and JDK will no longer be distributable within Slackware since Oracle prohibited any distro-spesific release.

Another problem they may encountered is the new dependencies that are rising up along with new version released such as KDE, XFCE, GTK, GIMP, Amarok, etc. They must make sure that everything fits within 6 CDs (including the sources) or they will have to add another CD.

RHEL and CentOS has been using 2 DVDs for their latest release, but i'm not really sure Slackware will follow their method. It's not Slackware's way to pack those packages.

Only time can tell, so be patient guys... :)